Some Questions and Answers about God’s Covenant and the Sacrament That Is a Seal of God’s Covenant. Robert Rollock

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Some Questions and Answers about God’s Covenant and the Sacrament That Is a Seal of God’s Covenant - Robert Rollock

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his native Scotland.7 Rollock’s labors as principal, preacher, writer, and teacher were cut short by a fairly premature death—he had just turned forty-four—in February of 1599. He left behind him a wife Helen, who was pregnant with their first child (a daughter, Jean) when he died.8

      Rollock’s Role in the Development of Reformed Covenant Theology

      Exclusive attention to Rollock’s 1597 Tractatus in judgments about his role in the development of Reformed covenant thought is attended by certain problems. For one thing, there are aspects of Rollock’s thinking on the divine covenants that surface much more clearly in his catechism and commentaries than in his treatise on effectual calling. So, for example, the way in which Rollock’s ideas about God’s covenants (both before and after the fall) inform his thinking on the sacraments (both before and after the fall) becomes apparent from the catechism, which takes both covenant and sacrament as its themes, but not from the 1597 Tractatus, which contains scarcely a word on the sacraments. More substantial problems, perhaps, attend the oversight of Rollock’s catechism and commentaries in efforts to parse how and when discrete covenantal concepts appeared in Reformed writings of the late sixteenth-century, or in closely related (if arguably unfruitful) efforts to determine who influenced whom in the progress of covenantal ideas.

      Such nitpicking about the precise date of Perkins’ first reference to “the legal and evangelical covenants” assumes some significance, perhaps, when juxtaposed with Rollock’s comments on God’s covenants in his 1590 Ephesians commentary, a work based on his lectures from the late 1580s. Commenting on Eph 1:7, Rollock noted that every spiritual benefit ultimately enjoyed by believers is founded upon God’s decree. He identified God’s promise in time as God’s means of executing his eternal decree, and then added:

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